Following the close, AT&T will retain the Cricket brand. However, AT&T recently launched Aio Wireless to compete against the likes of Cricket or MetroPCS. Over the coming months, AT&T will be developing plans for how to combine the Aio operations with Cricket once the deal closes. Whether this means keeping the Cricket name or not remains to be seen.

They had to give up some spectrum (Worth $1 billion) to T-Mobile as part of the breakup fee which T-Mobile is using to roll out their LTE network (They're also reusing some of Metro PCS's spectrum as well for this.).

Quoting EricR (Reply 1):Following the close, AT&T will retain the Cricket brand. However, AT&T recently launched Aio Wireless to compete against the likes of Cricket or MetroPCS. Over the coming months, AT&T will be developing plans for how to combine the Aio operations with Cricket once the deal closes. Whether this means keeping the Cricket name or not remains to be seen.

If you look at a company like TracFone. they offer MVNO services under multiple brands (TracFone, Straight Talk, NET10 Wireless, SafeLink Wireless, TelCel America and Simple Mobile [which is a recent acquistion].), so AT&T would likely keep their Aio operation alongside Cricket (Just as T-Mobile plans to keep Metro PCS around.). AT&T could opt to make one of them a BYOD MVNO along the lines of TracFone's Simple Mobile. BYOD could be a way to keep AT&T customers in the family if they need a cheaper plan.

Quoting ouboy79 (Reply 3):Market is definitely getting smaller. Only a matter of time at this point until someone snatches of US Cellular - even though they just dumped a lot of low revenue accounts on Sprint.

Sprint didn't give a crap about the customer base. That move was about spectrum in the Chicago area. US Cellular is continuing this theme and selling itself off bit by bit.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.' -Theodore Roosevelt

Quoting N328KF (Reply 4):Sprint didn't give a crap about the customer base. That move was about spectrum in the Chicago area. US Cellular is continuing this theme and selling itself off bit by bit.

Quoting seabiscuit (Reply 5):This move will make the market significantly smaller than it already is today. I hope the feds take a good look at this move to see how the consumers will be impacted by this change.

Many of these recent acquisitions (or proposed acquisitions) are simply for one thing and one thing only, spectrum. AT&T plans to acquire Alltel and now Leap aren't about adding customers, its' about getting access to more spectrum as well towers and antennas. AT&T had to give up a decent amount of spectrum to T-Mobile in the breakup of that deal and this is a way of getting that back and then some. But it has cost them a lot of money, since they paid about $4 billion (including the value of the spectrum they gave up) to T-Mobile, they spent $600 million to acquire NextWave (another case of a company bought for their spectrum) and the Alltel and Leap purchases will cost them nearly $2 billion.

U.S. Cellular is likely a takeover target in the near future. With Dish Network failing in its' bid to acquire Sprint and Clearwire, they may look to acquire smaller wireless carriers, and I'd put U.S. Cellular as a one of those targets if they do intend to continue to push into wireless.

Quoting N328KF (Reply 4):Sprint didn't give a crap about the customer base. That move was about spectrum in the Chicago area. US Cellular is continuing this theme and selling itself off bit by bit.

Oh I agree USCC is just parting itself out at this point. I'm also sure Sprint didn't care about the customer base at all, because who would. The vast majority of those people, from what I was told, were low usage accounts on basic phones that average around 1 MB...MB...of data usage per cycle. In today's world that is what you call a waste of space.

USCC had a lot of promise, but couldn't deliver. I remember being at the management announcement when they did their Belief Project a few years back. The no contract, rewards program, etc...were all good ideas. The tears and cheers from executives and other managers showed how big this was to all of them. However they didn't get any attention from any of the big 4. Here we are 3 years later and T-Mobile is doing roughly the same thing and they are getting much more press about it. At this point they come across as more of a waste of space or an after thought. Especially since we are on the race to consolidation where we will probably only have the 4 big guys.

Unlike other countries the GSM carriers in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile) were spectrum STARVED and this consolidates network operations and massively increases capacity.

The US market is weird in that it is the only country left to have a majority of its population on a CDMA2000 network.

AT&T and T-Mobile has a very high amount of international roaming and SIM card traffic on its network in US global cities like NYC, LA, Miami, DC etc and it has had to build more and more cell sites not only to supports the very high data traffic its experiencing with the iPhone (all carriers are experiencing this) but very high revenue international traffic that AT&T and T-Mobile carry.

The spectrum break-out to T-Mobile in the failed merger was about AWS spectrum for LTE. AT&T in this merger gets AWS LTE spectrum (soon to be the roaming LTE band for the Americas) and PCS which they desperately need. Combing T-Mobile's and MetroPCS's network into a UMTS/HSPA+ network will result in a superior customer experience. AT&T will shutdown the CDMA network and move its customers to its UMTS and LTE networks for the Leap Wireless deal like the T-Mobile/MetroPCS deal.